Using XmlAttributeOverrides to ignore elements not working

Question

I'm doing the following to ignore a couple of elements on serialization only:

public class Parent
{
    public SomeClass MyProperty {get;set;}
    public List<Child> Children {get;set;}
}

public class Child
{
    public SomeClass MyProperty {get;set;}
}

public class SomeClass 
{
    public string Name {get;set;}
}

XmlAttributes ignore = new XmlAttributes()
{
    XmlIgnore = true
};

XmlAttributeOverrides overrides = new XmlAttributeOverrides();
overrides.Add(typeof(SomeClass), "MyProperty", ignore);

var xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyParent), overrides);

The class properties do not have the XmlElement attribute. The property name also matches the string passed to overrides.Add .

However, the above is not ignoring the property and it's still serialized.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

The type to pass in to XmlAttributeOverrides.Add(Type type, string member, XmlAttributes attributes) is not the type that the member returns. It's the type in which the member is declared . Thus to ignore MyProperty in both Parent and Child you must do:

XmlAttributes ignore = new XmlAttributes()
{
    XmlIgnore = true
};

XmlAttributeOverrides overrides = new XmlAttributeOverrides();
//overrides.Add(typeof(SomeClass), "MyProperty", ignore); // Does not work.  MyProperty is not a member of SomeClass
overrides.Add(typeof(Parent), "MyProperty", ignore);
overrides.Add(typeof(Child), "MyProperty", ignore);

xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Parent), overrides);          

Note that, if you construct an XmlSerializer with overrides, you must cache it statically to avoid a severe memory leak. See Memory Leak using StreamReader and XmlSerializer for details.

Sample fiddle .